Digital advertisements have become a widely popular means for advertising products and targeting specific consumers. The current, widespread use and popularity of mobile devices has enabled advertisers to reach a far broader audience than before, using digital advertisements. Digital advertisements also allow users to seek desired products and advertisements directly from their mobile device, at any time convenient to the user. Not surprisingly, both users and advertisers have capitalized on the convenience and popularity of mobile devices to frequently buy and sell products using digital advertisements on mobile devices.
Advertisers generally configure their digital advertisements to be displayed along with media content accessed by the user. The digital advertisement is typically presented as a display banner at a fixed position in the screen of the user's device, to allow the user to view the advertisement as he or she accesses media content from the device. However, display advertising using fixed, or static, position banners is prone to ‘banner blindness’ which overtime reduces its effectiveness and efficacy for conversion. Banner blindness is used to describe a common phenomenon, where users consciously or subconsciously ignore banner-like information when they browse through content. This phenomenon is also present in the context of display banner advertising on mobile devices.
Given the relatively small screen and real estate available in mobile devices for positioning advertisements, the current standard for display advertisement positioning is at the top or bottom of the mobile applications. Several technology advances have made it possible to render higher quality display banners, which can help fight banner blindness. In particular, several formats, such as rich media expandable advertisement format, IAB OPA format, and the ‘takeover’ format, have been implemented in an attempt to overcome banner blindness in the desktop environment. However, these desktop banner formats do not have counterparts on the mobile medium, likely because they would be deemed by users to be extremely intrusive and annoying. Yet banner blindness remains a significant problem in digital advertisement in the mobile context. In fact, banner blindness is commonly aggravated in the mobile context. For example, in the mobile context, the user is often highly engaged on a small screen with mobile applications, and, thus, more likely to ignore any advertisements. Many times, the user is engaged in gaming content, which may not permit simultaneous interaction with advertising content. As a result, the user is similarly unlikely to notice any advertisements. Thus, current banner technologies have significant limitations, and, in many cases, are ineffective, particularly in the mobile context.